Set width of dropdown element in HTML select dropdown options

Question

I am working on a website that involves automatically populating a select box using a PHP script. This all works fine except the problem is that what I am using to populate

Answer 1

I find the best way to handle long dropdown boxes is to put it inside a fixed width div container and use width:auto on the select tag. Most browsers will contain the dropdown within the div, but when you click on it, it will expand to display the full option value. It does not work with IE explorer, but there is a fix (like is always needed with IE). Your code would look something like this.

HTML

  
    LONG OPTION
    short
  

CSS

div.dropdown_container {
    width:10px;
}

select.my_dropdown {
    width:auto;
}

/*IE FIX */
select#my_dropdown {
    width:100%;
}

select:focus#my_dropdown {
    width:auto\9;
}